True North Defender Canadian Armed Forces content archive

Sources & corrections

This site takes official data, joins it in ways the official sources do not, and writes around it. That means three different kinds of material sit side by side on most pages, and you should be able to tell which is which. This page says.

Where the data comes from

Occupations

Refreshed from the public careers API that the forces.ca careers browser itself reads. Short excerpts only, with every entry linking back to its official page — the site summarises and points, it does not republish.

108 occupations

Ranks and pay

Regular Force monthly salary from the CAF pay tables, effective April 1, 2025. Reserve Class A and B rates are published separately and are not reproduced here. NATO codes are derived from the STANAG 2116 comparative tables, not from a CAF source.

19 rank levels

Equipment

Hand-maintained from Department of National Defence and elemental publications, procurement announcements and contract awards. Status and quantities change often; the date each entry was last touched is in the change log.

38 items tracked

Service life

Terms of service, obligatory service, the professional development framework, leave, pension and release — summarised from Queen’s Regulations and Orders, Defence Administrative Orders and Directives, Military Personnel Instructions and the Treasury Board pension tables. Each section on the page links the instrument it summarises.

7 policy areas

The joins

Which occupation works with which equipment exists in no official source. It is assembled here, by hand, and only where the link is defensible — the test is operates or maintains, not travels in. This is the part of the site with no authority behind it but its own.

43 occupations mapped

What is original, and what is not

Government of Canada Occupation descriptions, pay figures, and the structural facts about formations and schools. Crown copyright; excerpted and linked, never reproduced wholesale.
Original to this site The rank descriptions, equipment notes, occupation notes, the trade-to-equipment mapping, the glossary and the design. © 2026 True North Defender.
Derived NATO rank codes, annual figures calculated from monthly ones, and every count on the site. Derived from the above, and no more authoritative than what they came from.
The code Open source under the GNU General Public License v3.0. The data and writing above are not covered by that grant.
The typefaces Newsreader by Production Type, Public Sans by the US General Services Administration, and IBM Plex Mono by IBM — all under the SIL Open Font License 1.1, self-hosted so no font request leaves this site.

What this site is not

Not official, and not affiliated with the Canadian Armed Forces or the Department of National Defence. It cannot process an application, confirm your eligibility, or tell you what you will be paid. Where a figure here matters to a decision you are making, check it against canada.ca or forces.ca — those are the authority, and this is a reference.

Notes on occupation pages carry the source they came from and the date that source was last checked, so you can see how fresh any particular claim is rather than trusting the site as a whole.

Send a correction

Errors of fact, stale figures, broken structure, a trade that has been renamed — all welcome. Corrections get logged publicly on the change log, not quietly fixed.

truenorthdefender@proton.me

What changed and when

Every data refresh and every correction, with the current generation date of each dataset.

Change log